Manufacturers must provide information about their products to resellers, consumers, and others. Resellers need product information to select, promote and support the products they distribute. Consumers need information about available products to make informed buying choices. Advertisers, product analysts, manufacturer's representatives, shippers, and others also need information about the goods with which they deal.
Under current practices, product information typically originates with manufacturers and is primarily distributed in conventional print media advertising and product packaging. This information is often incomplete, difficult to update, and available only to a limited distribution. While the advent of the World Wide Web has permitted manufacturers to make detailed, up-to-date product information available via the Internet, the information describing a specific product is often difficult to locate, particularly when the URL (uniform resource locator) of the manufacturer's website is not known.
It is the principle object of the present invention to facilitate the transfer of information about products from manufacturers or suppliers to resellers, customers, and any others who need or desire that information.
The present invention employs an Internet resource, called a "product code translator," for storing cross-references between universal product codes identifying specific products and Internet addresses specifying the locations at which information about these products may be obtained. In accordance with the invention, the cross-references are transferred from participating manufacturers to the product code translator using a product code registration process. The transferred cross-references specify the universal product codes assigned to the participating manufacturers, such as the U.P.C. and EAN codes widely used in retail stores for barcode scanning at checkout counters. The centrally stored cross-references thus correlate sets of universal product codes with the Internet addresses where information can be obtained about the products designated by those codes.
Utilizing the principles of the invention, resellers, potential customers, analysts, service and support personnel, end-users and others can obtain and use detailed, accurate and up-to-date information about any product of interest made available in this way by a participating manufacturer. Online resellers can display lists of products in response to search requests from customers, and provide the customer with detailed information about any listed product by incorporating links to the product information made available by the participating manufacturers. Searchable databases may be readily compiled by obtaining and indexing product description data which is retrieved from the manufacturers' Internet sites using the Internet addresses provided by the product code translator.
These and other objects, features and advantages of the present invention will be made more apparent through a consideration of the following detailed description of a preferred embodiment of the invention. In the course of this description, frequent reference will be made to the attached drawings.